Why is Higher Ed the Toughest Gig in all the Web?

One of my personal goals for 2010 is to expand my speaking engagements beyond higher ed conferences. While I value these conferences and will continue to attend them, there is a lot to be learned beyond the walls of the ivory tower.

In May, I will be speaking at the J. Boye Conference. I’m working on themes for my presentation and thought it might be interesting to explore why, IMHO, working in higher education is the most challenging sector for web development and share lessons learned that are applicable to everyone.

I’m looking to tap the collective intelligence of the higher ed web community. What do you think makes higher ed such a challenge? What are the lessons learned?

FYI – the conference is scheduled for Philadelphia on May 4-6, 2010. Registration is open and there is a 40% discount for anyone in higher ed. Be advised that the conference venue allows no more than 200 delegates, so first come, first served. Also, they are looking for additional speakers in the higher education track. Let me know if you are interested. More Information is available at http://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia10. Hope to see you there.

20 Comments

1) Small budget
2) Small staff
3) Very large goals from above
4) Short timelines
5) Uninformed committees creating said large goals
6) Not run like a business
7) In-house experts are not trusted as such, and often a third party is called in to tell committees what you have already told them

It’s the toughest because we must serve several audiences, all with different needs and expectations. Colleges and universities often have a long history and it’s tough to change things because “that’s the way it’s always been.”

This may come back to bite us in five years, when the students of that time are going to have very different expectations in terms of technology than they do today. I’m afraid a large number of schools are going to be left behind because of that reluctance to try new things and be creative because what they were doing had worked for 100 years.

Holy crap. I’m not even sure where to start on something like this. Persa hits several, and to add to those:
* Need to (at least try) to meet varying levels of accessibility/security compliancy
* Higher ed infrastructure is a slow, dogged beast that cannot keep up with the pace of web development
* Overlap of responsibilities with other offices
* Coordination of resources
* Administrative lack of awareness of the complexities of web communications
* Perception that everyone “owns” part of the web or should have a right to be involved
* Frequently, schools don’t value the web enough to hire the most talented people for the jobs, compounding small staffs with less-than enthusiastic or capable workers

I think one possible reason higher ed web is difficult is the diverse number of “audiences” or “communities” we are required to reach out to and engage with. Most corporate sites seem to have one, two, three, or maybe even 4 key audiences, but almost all higher ed web entities have at least six to seven including students, prospective students, faculty, staff, community, parents, alumni, and many others. That makes it a little tough to get the right information to the right people in the right presentation….etc.

I think Persa Zula hit on many of the major points. My main frustration right now is trying to cope with expectations of being a strategist for a campus while also performing tactical duties that have been holding our department back for years. (I alluded to this issue in my blog post today.)

One other point I would make is that higher ed marketing communications deals with far too many stakeholders. It would be nice to be able to prioritize and focus on the top two or three stakeholders, but that doesn’t happen too often.

Having said that, I think that higher ed may be a tough gig, but it is also a very rewarding one.

Glad to hear you’re speaking to groups outside of higher ed. I suspect many of them will benefit from what you have to say.

A lot of great thoughts on why higher ed is the toughest gig, but I’d also be curious about what ways people think it is easier.

So often it seems to me that higher ed marketing (including Web-based marketing efforts) are not scrutinized as heavily as they would be in the private sector for businesses with similar operating budgets/revenues. That alone removes a certain level of stress.

On higher ed sites I sometimes see features that were created because it was deemed “cool” or the Web developer wanted to experiment to expand skills or simply have some fun.

Large corporate Web developers likely don’t have that same luxury.

#justsayin

Ross
on January 21, 2010 at 4:57 pm

Kudos to Persa Zulu and the other posters.

I think it can be simplified to the concept of “how hard can it be to make a web site?” The average person surfs dozens, if not hundreds, of pages a day with no regard for the time put into creating them. We have faculty members who think that their Ph.D.s make them experts in any field they choose to pontificate in. We have administrators – often faculty members themselves – who make choices based on pacifying the masses. Both groups tend to fail to recognize that they are selling a product as if doing so would completely taint the education experience and cause Socrates to go spinning in his tomb.

Mark Greenfield
on January 21, 2010 at 5:11 pm

Thanks everyone for your comments.

My inspiration for this topic is Steve Krug whom I’ve seen talk twice about this topic. Here are his

Richard Orelup
on January 21, 2010 at 7:00 pm

I would argue the exact opposite. The issues listed in the first comment can be found everywhere in relation to the web. My last job was for an IT Consulting/”Do it all” firm. While the 7th one doesn’t really apply, the rest did. I believe those issues are pretty much par for the course when it comes to most web jobs in any industry.

For me being in Higher Ed has been great because the stress level is significantly less then it would be anywhere else. The workload isn’t normally anything out of whack and in the few cases where I was putting in long hours I was able to later take comp time off. For me this is the first High Ed place I have worked but from others that I talked to that have moved between institutions they have had the same experience.

For me, the only real issue I have seen are having projects that are overall wastes and stopping silly exceptions. Because there is sometimes no “real” cost (in the eyes of the person requesting the project/exception) they therefore will start projects for things that are essentially just a waste of time. Things like getting people to spend weeks on a micro-site that only 100 people will ever go to that could have been just 1 page on the main site. That’s not just a High Ed problem but we run into it more often because people don’t see what it actually costs.

But really I don’t see how anyone could even suggest that a High Ed web job is anywhere near the toughest of web jobs. There are web guys I know in other industries that have it a lot tougher and it would be unfair for us to ever think otherwise.

Systemic organizational dysfunction is, IMHO, the root cause of problems in higher ed. That’s not exclusive to the higher ed field as Richard Orelup has suggested above, but certainly lingers longer than it would in most corporate settings.

In terms of the web, higher ed has had a history of being a technological and conceptual late comer with all the disadvantages those distinctions bestow. Some schools made poor decisions early on in terms of infrastructure, organizational hierarchy and other basic areas. Today, that history results in their inability to meet the needs of their core student audience (i.e. their biggest revenue source).

In an effort to stay relevant, they’ve hired experienced personnel and given them significant responsibility. Typically, though, that responsibility hasn’t come with the requisite amount of authority to achieve it, mainly because of the lingering organizational dysfunction that exists. We all know too well how effective the design by committee scenario goes.

So, we find web teams (if those even exist in an organized fashion) trying to do good work, but unable to stop the inertia pushing them in ever unfruitful directions. The only viable alternative is not to stop the inertia, but to slowly deflect it in hopes that incremental course corrections will ultimately get them on the right track. But in the fast paced world that is the web, that’s a recipe for continually being behind the times. There is indeed improvement over time, but no paradigm shift that catapults a school into the forefront of exceptional web experiences.

Exceptions to this do exist, but they are few and far between though I see the pace of positive change growing.

Agree with much of the above, especially Persa Zula, Michael Fienen and Mike Rivera, and like Richard Orelup, I’ve seen similar issues outside higher ed.

I’d add to the above:

– No clear metrics for success
– It’s easy to get away with failing to check in with users

When you’re working for a business or fundraising for a non-profit, it is relatively easy to relate particular online activities to a definable outcome: money per unit time. This provides some measure of arbitration when it comes to deciding what’s viable and what’s not.

In the higher-ed world, it can be hard to define outcomes that are measurable. For instance, the aim of one site I worked on was “to attract high quality graduate students”. Since the quality of students can only really be assessed after several years, we had to use proxy measures… which may or may not have been correlated with true student quality.

But at least we tried to measure things, and improve our offerings based on our findings. In my experience, combining usability studies and web analytic data to guide investment in online activity is all too rare in higher ed. Instead, many folks seem to take the view “we like it, and it’s up there, so it’s all great”.

I’d even go so far as to say that many people feel threatened by data about usage of their sites, and because there is typically no compulsion to take decisions based on objective data rather than subjective opinion, people don’t do it.

My apologies, Mark: When i first read your post, I overlooked the fact that you were focusing solely on the web side. I was taking a broader view of higher ed marketing as a whole. I’d love to see you address the issue of integrating web or electronic marketing communications into the broader realm of higher ed marketing communications. When we talk about fiefdoms, sometimes we overlook the fact that we have fiefdoms of our own in higher ed marketing.

IMO, the challenges of working in higher ed have to deal with how it’s structured. It’s not top down. The faculty have shared governance, which influences both decision making and faculty attitudes. It’s why we must work through committees.

Additionally, marketing is viewed through suspicious eyes by many faculty and administrators (since, as one commenter said, many administrators are current or former faculty members). Why? Marketing’s values tend to compete with traditional ideas of higher education. (Of course, without marketing and websites, etc. colleges and universities couldn’t stay in business.) Because of not granting marketing much esteem, administrators and faculty don’t really know what goes on and that is why marketing/web professionals and programs may not be “scrutinized” as much as they are in the for-profit world.

It’s all a rather interesting and fulfilling place to work. There’s really nothing like campus life. I’ve written about this subject on my blog, if you’re interested.

You guys whine too much. I’ll take the quirks of university web development over the drone of corporate hell, any day.

In my experience, web communications work for higher ed has been be so much more interesting and fulfilling. My first reaction to people who complain goes like: “So how does this compare to the all-nighters you pulled in your time at the agency? Or, Tell me about your experiences at Initech Would you like to go back?”

I would have to say that the primary reason that higher ed web stuff is unique to the private sector stuff is:

…the volume of content that needs to be managed and maintained in order for that content to be relevant, accurate and useful to our audiences (internal and external) is dramatically more – on average – in comparison to those web folks working in the private sector.

The scope of responsibility is larger for higher ed web professionals than it is for private sector web professionals.

The level of ‘intensity’ is definitely higher in the private sector (as results are tied directly to profits/revenue, etc.).

Drew is right. Higher ed is cushy compared to my experiences outside of it. But it’s still a very strange world to explain to people who have nothing to do with it and can be hard to translate.

I think while it can be a relatively safe industry, compared to some others, and there’s a certain premium on learning and thoughtfulness that maybe other industries aren’t as concerned about — preferring to be more bottom line driven — I think there are still some very specific problems that you only deal with in higher education that surely drive more folks out than bring them in.

Universities are “collectives” and lack corporate command and control mechanisms and culture. “Herding cats” is a good analogy.
However, I think the intellectual culture and stimulation from “the young” and from research and exploration make it the BEST place to be.

Susan
on December 7, 2010 at 12:46 pm

Fienen hit the nail on the head with this:

* Administrative lack of awareness of the complexities of web communications
* Perception that everyone

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